A radical in the House

She has gone from Catholic working-class Glasgow to the Lords as a Labour peer, but Helena Kennedy has no intention of toeing the party line. She has made her name fighting for the underdog and defending civil liberties. Her new book, Just Law, may well raise government hackles further

"First I was at the Old Bailey making a closing speech to the jury in a murder trial," says Baroness Helena Kennedy, describing a day from her diary, which, while not exactly typical, is not that unusual either. "I spoke for an hour-and-a-half, which is like doing several rounds with Muhammad Ali, but that is the bit I really enjoy. It is real advocacy. I then went to the House of Lords where I gave evidence before a select committee about the Human Genetics Commission, which I chair. And then I ran to Portcullis House where I was taking part in a meeting for the British Council [which she also chairs] about how we can persuade the G8 to take Africa seriously. That took in things like how marginalisation and poverty can breed terrorism and so it was almost a perfect working day for me. All my current passions came together and while it was tiring, it was also exhilarating."

She might also have included work related to her educational charity, the Helena Kennedy Foundation, or any of the other commissions and committees to which she contributes. Most recently, she has been asked to lead an inquiry into better ways of investigating babies' deaths after convictions of women thought to have murdered their children were overturned. All these activities entail grappling with contentious social and political issues, but it is another component of Kennedy's bulging portfolio, as a Labour peer in the Lords, that is the most controversial part of her life.

She became Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws after the 1997 general election and since then has seen herself transformed from one of Labour's most high-profile supporters into one of its most high-profile critics. "It is important not to lose sight of the fact that good things have come from this government and I do not want a Conservative government back," she says. "But when it comes to this business of law and legal principle, I think they are getting it seriously wrong and nothing will persuade me otherwise."

As someone who believes in a reformed and fully elected second chamber, Kennedy says she was persuaded by the government to support, despite some reservations, its proposals for a new supreme court and is content that the government is taking more time to consider its next steps in removing the remaining hereditary peers. "My main disagreements with the government at the moment are around its responses to terrorism," she says, describing the Home Office statement following the recent release of a Libyan man held for 15 months without trial as "proof the system works" as, "the most staggering chutzpah. I am not a civil rights hardliner in that I do acknowledge that in certain cases suspects should be held for longer periods than normal to arrange for Arabic translators or for contacts with security forces overseas," she continues. "But then there must be proper due process in dealing with them. You don't fight terrorism by destroying democracy."

Kennedy has consistently raised objections to a range of related government proposals around law and order, the principles of the legal system and social justice, and has been particularly vociferous about plans to limit the right to trial by jury. So well known were her views that the whips seemed to have abandoned her as a hopeless case on these issues, but an appearance last month on BBC radio's Today programme again saw her in trouble with party managers. Asked to comment on David Blunkett's suggestion of partially secret, non-jury trials for UK terrorist suspects, Kennedy responded by branding the home secretary a "shameless authoritarian" who takes his "lessons in jurisprudence from Robert Mugabe".

"I may have made some people angry and some people who did call themselves my friends may not feel that any more," she says. "But you have to look at yourself in the mirror every morning. Someone said to me that you have to swallow stones in government. Well, I do understand that there has to be a degree of compromise in government, but there are some stones that I just won't swallow."

The lawyer and former ANC activist Albie Sachs is an old friend. After years in revolutionary exile he is now a member of South Africa's highest court and says he understands well the tensions of her position. "After a lifetime as a radical challenging the establishment, your whole personality and style and way of thinking have developed in terms of challenge. And then, suddenly, the door opens and you are inside. How do you handle it? What does it mean to be a radical in the House of Lords? What does it do to that radical, contestatory soul? I think we've both, by different routes, come to respect the importance of constitutionalism. But perhaps it is 'once a troublemaker always a troublemaker', although when you get older you do it with a little more nuance and focus and perhaps panache."

Kennedy says Labour got into government wanting to reform the public services "but they made the mistake of thinking that justice was just another part of that. And they ended up speaking about constitutional change in almost the same way as they would speak about a new policy for roads or something."

She built her reputation as a radical lawyer and has published a new book, Just Law, which she says explains that "when governments play fast and loose we should watch our backs. The title comes from a phrase used to me by someone in government. He asked why I was protesting so much - "it's just law". The book has reinforced her rebel credentials with the news-making accusation that the government engaged in "window shopping for the right legal advice" in justifying the Iraq war. She also criticised the government's plans - now shelved - to remove the right of asylum- seekers to judicial review.

Labour MP Clive Soley says he is sympathetic to Kennedy's concern for civil liberties, but says her approach is becoming counterproductive. "The Mugabe comment was way over the top and has had the effect of marginalising her, which is a pity. She comes at the issue from a liberal-left point of view, which is something I support. But I think she underestimates how much the public is fearful and wants to know a government is protecting them. This is probably because she is not an elected politician and doesn't hear that side so much."

Fellow human-rights lawyer Geoffrey Bindman praises her brand of passionate advocacy in a profession that generally prefers to remain at arm's length but acknowledges that "there is always a danger that someone who is so passionately committed will make the more conventionally minded people think of her as a bit of a maverick. But while there is no doubt she can rub people up the wrong way, she is never unreasonable and she doesn't dismiss people even though she disagrees with them."

Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, who takes over as chair of the British Council this year, has been a friend since the early 1980s. "Without being self-conscious about it, she does believe there is a place in democratic politics for catalytic words and actions," he says. "But that is not the same as going out and looking for trouble. You can't help feeling that problems crash into Helena, rather than her going looking for them. And she is consistent, so whether you agree or disagree with her, she has to be taken seriously." Kinnock also thinks she has political nous, calling her "necessarily dexterous and sensitive to public opinion. She couldn't win as many cases as she does unless she were. Victories in law don't entirely depend upon mastery of statute and you can't come from where she has come from without having your feet on the ground."

Kennedy explains that although she was brought up and educated in working-class Glasgow, "we were still made to do debating and things like that at school. It teaches you to take the other side of an argument, which was a great discipline. It is a wonderful part of Scottish life that they develop the democratic instincts. So you end up questioning things and you don't just go through the lobby when they tell you to."

Helena Kennedy was born in Glasgow in 1950 into a family of Labour activists. Her father, a printer on the Daily Record, was a trade-union official; with her two elder sisters and mother, she would lick envelopes for the Labour party. Nearly every newspaper article about her contains the words "Gorbals" and "tenement". "But in truth the Gorbals were a mile up the road," she explains. "I was brought up in a tenement but we were respectable working class. My dad was a person who read books and we went to the library every week. We were Catholic church-going folk who played their part in the community." Although she says she is no longer comfortable with Catholic orthodoxy, she does attend Mass and says her Catholicism "remains very much part of who I am".

She was made head girl at Holyrood Secondary School and was planning to read English at Glasgow University. "Then, rather late, I became very attracted to the idea of doing law and also of going to London because the 60s hadn't really yet started in Glasgow. The LSE was the great radical place in 1968 and I was interviewed there by Bill Wedderburn, the great expert in trade-union law. I was too late to get a place at the LSE that year so he first advised me to do a gap year - which, because I was the first person from my family to apply to university, was out of the question - and then that I should do a year at law school and see how I liked it."

Wedderburn, a Labour peer since 1977, has accompanied Kennedy into the rebel lobby in the Lords on occasion. "There are some people you meet who you think might like law and she was obviously one of those," he says. "She went on to have a wonderful career and it is no surprise that she has had some regrets about coming to the Lords. We all have. If you spent your early life saying the place should be abolished and then you go in, having weighed up the pros and cons, it is necessarily often an ambivalent experience. Lords reform is a long-distance race. But she has taken up the causes you would expect her to take up and has been very resolute."

As soon as she began to study at the Council for Legal Education law school, Kennedy said she had "a feeling of coming home that has never gone away". Lawyer Angelica Mitchell met her when they were both 18 and were called to the bar at Gray's Inn the same night in 1972. "Even then she had amazing powers of communication and was extremely articulate," says Mitchell. "I always thought of her as a bit of a star even though I do think she found Gray's Inn very intimidating."

Chris Sallon, a colleague in her chambers, was another contemporary. "Helena didn't conform to the usual model of a Gray's Inn student at that time, who were generally from rather privileged backgrounds. And she was very passionate about the concept of justice. In the early 70s there were some idealistic young lawyers around, but on the whole it was not an idealistic profession. But while she did have reservations and sometimes clashes with people, she got on fine through force of personality and charm and warmth."

Kennedy remembers her initial learning curve was "far more about social stuff than academic stuff. I felt I was stepping into an Evelyn Waugh novel. It was jaw-dropping to me that I would have conversations where people would talk about a 'cockers p' by which they meant a cocktail party. They clearly had households full of domestic staff and they had been to schools which were straight out of books. But while I was busily watching what knife to use and all that, I was fairly rooted in who I was. My parents were confident about themselves and would be themselves whoever they were with. They gave that gift to me. Being a working-class person was not a source of shame."

Kennedy's conversation is breathlessly peppered with the words "dear" and "dearie", and animated with a reinforcing hand on the knee or elbow. It is a style of delivery that changes remarkably little even when she is speaking in court or in the Lords. Television journalist Jon Snow has known her since the early 70s and says: "She has been extraordinarily consistent and has not turned into an old snob. Most people would have been intimidated or socially ostracised out of it but she has refused to be. The establishment is designed to knock these people into shape and then re-class them like themselves. But Helena has stayed the same throughout."

As a young barrister, Kennedy's first pupil-master was the now-Labour MP Brian Sedgemore. He remembers her as being "much more retiring than she is now, although she was always good at her job and nothing was pushed past her. I think before she worked with me she didn't realise that you could have rows with judges."

Kennedy says her initial ambition was "to become a trade-union lawyer or something like that. I still saw the law as something that very posh people in wigs and gowns did. It all seemed too grand for me but it developed step by step as I started to do general criminal law." She thrived on being part of a new generation of radical lawyers and says straightforwardly that "this was an era in which we really thought we could change the world. It is a complete accident that I ended up here in the Lords. Back then it was wonderful that what we wanted to do in the world politically meshed so well with our daily rounds as lawyers. I thought it was great when people said to my mother that they had heard I was a lawyer she would say 'yes, but she's a poor man's lawyer'."

For a few years in her early 20s she was a member of the Communist party, despite many of her leftist friends joining the more fashionable Trotskyite organisations. "In a way it was a ridiculous party to join and I look back on it ruefully now," she says. "It was probably to do with my working-class Glasgow roots and not wanting all that trendy stuff. But I met some wonderful people and read lots. And I came into contact with some of the most interesting feminist thinking around at that time." As a young lawyer Kennedy was shocked at the casual discrimination against women in the profession, but says her real empathy was reserved for "the women who came in as clients. I started to represent prostitutes and people like that and that really sharpened up my sense of how the law didn't work for whole groups of people."

In 1993 she published her first book, a critique of the way British justice treated women, Eve Was Framed, and it was through a lawyer specialising in defending women that Kennedy came to the attention of Albie Sachs. In exile from South Africa, he was lecturing in law at Southampton University. "I read a lively and spirited article by a young barrister and when I later met her she measured up to it," he says. "And in a way she lived the points she was making. It wasn't just an intellectual complaint. Here was someone with energy and intellectual acumen and a lot of life experience and things to say and there were often unconscious features of life at the bar that were holding her back."

It was partly because of the lack of opportunities for women lawyers that Kennedy, aged only 24, set up Garden Court in 1974. "It just didn't occur to me that it was anything unusual to start a new set of chambers," she says. "But I do have an entrepreneurial streak in me that I have only recently noticed." She began to work on sex-discrimination cases, domestic violence against women and defending women who had killed or assaulted violent partners. Professor Nigel Eastman, head of forensic psychiatry at St George's Hospital Medical School, has worked closely with her over many years on these cases and was struck by how passionately involved she becomes in a case. "Most lawyers are either stiletto-like forensics or hysterics who like performing in front of juries," he says. "She was neither type but she had a great ability to speak to people. There are other senior barristers who might be more able than her as lawyers, but working in a criminal trial, the essential thing is to convince a jury and that means the jury gaining some sense of empathy with the defendant and she has an extraordinary ability to achieve that."

Kennedy says: "I think I am quite good at demystifying the law and I haven't lost the ability to speak to ordinary people without being patronising. I think that's what helps give me a special flavour as an advocate. But since I came to the bar there has been a stylistic shift and people now do try to be more accessible. I like to feel I was in at the beginning of that wave."

Her work at what she calls "the interface between psychiatry and law" has been a long-standing preoccupation. Eastman says she has "pushed at the boundaries of the use of psychiatric evidence in court in an attempt to try to humanise the law. She uses psychiatry to try to explain to a jury what it is like to be a battered woman."

As a working mother, Kennedy says she has had to be very disciplined about allotting time to her family life. "Sometimes you will realise that things are getting out of kilter so you pull back and spend more time at home. So you constantly manoeuvre yourself, and of course, I've been very lucky with the people who have worked with my children. They have stayed years and years." She and her first partner, the actor Iain Mitchell, met in the late 70s and lived together until 1984. Their son, Keir, 20, is studying sports science. She met her present husband, the facial surgeon Iain Hutchinson, during an IRA trial in the mid-80s. At the time she was suffering from chronic sinusitis, although it was undiagnosed by her doctors. "And I met this handsome doctor. We spoke about my job and as he sometimes had to give evidence as an expert witness, he asked whether he could come to the Old Bailey some time. And then he inveigled himself a lunch date and there you are." They married in 1986 and have two children, Clio, 17, and Roland, 14.

Sachs says "Helena goes 100% at her ideas, at her relationships, at her writing, her profession. It's not easy. We used to be very hard on ourselves in the 70s and the whole business of lifestyles seemed rather relentless. We beat up on ourselves a lot, but she shows that you can be fun and enjoy doing things and be nice to be around. And that is also something important, as well as your ideas being right."

As a writer on the law from the outset of her career, it was unsurprising that Kennedy should have gravitated towards other media. In the mid-80s she presented the ethical issues series Heart of the Matter on television and created, with the playwright Peter Flannery, the legal drama Blind Justice. "For a time, I could easily have been seduced into working full-time in television," she says. "But I made the very careful decision that I didn't want that. I didn't want to become dislocated from the law as I realised it meant too much to me."

In 1990 she and some colleagues interested in broad human-rights issues set up the Doughty Street chambers, of which she is still a member. She was elected to the Bar Council the same year and in 1991 was made a QC. By this time she was a leading figure in the criminal bar and a series of high-profile cases, including the Michael Bettany spy trial, the Brighton bombing and the Guildford Four appeal had made her well known beyond the bar. During her work on Irish cases she had to go ex-directory and her flat was broken into, although nothing was stolen, "which left you feeling deeply uncomfortable. People make assumptions and I've been screamed at for being a 'Fenian bastard' so you have to keep reminding people that just because you are defending a group you are not defending their politics."

While she says the Guildford Four appeal was obviously a career high-point and a particularly interesting piece of law with which to be involved, it is some of the lesser-known cases that have affected her more emotionally and stayed with her longer. "There was an elderly woman who was in prison for 11 years for a miscarriage of justice and when she got out she didn't really know how to do anything. And the woman accused of blowing up the Israeli Embassy in 1994, who was clearly innocent and a terrible mistake had taken place. Being close to these people, dealing with them when they are terrified before a trial, it reminds you what it is all about."

When Kennedy entered the Lords in 1997 it was as chair of the pressure group Charter 88, whose policies for constitutional reform had been taken up by Labour in opposition. "Though whether the ideas had really sunk into the marrow of their bones I don't know," she says. "But I came here thinking I was going to be part of a serious programme of constitutional reform and it was a wonderful and very pleasurable experience to be part of the human rights act. But on many other issues it has been a different story, so of course I've had my regrets as to whether I should have come in here."

Snow says that as a political operator and social campaigner she has been extremely effective "and has been very, very consistent and become a serious thorn in the flesh of the people who appointed her. It has been tough for her, but in the main that's kind of what she expected. And because New Labour never reformed the House of Lords, and appointed her very young, they are stuck with her until the day she dies." Kennedy confesses that she is not used to being unpopular. "As a campaigner for women I got up plenty of dinosaur judges' noses. And being active around the issues of terrorism and the right to a fair trial there were plenty of folk who didn't like that, but they weren't my people who were being angry with me. Not having the support and affection of the people I think of as friends has been a very painful process." But she has no intention of giving up the whip even though she has heard, "muttered through gritted teeth", that she should be a cross-bencher. "I wasn't one of those people who joined the Labour party when they were offered a place in the House of Lords or the day before the '97 election. I am not going to be forced out, no matter how much it annoys them that I appear on the Today programme described as a Labour peer."